Oakland: Tale of The Dragon tells how Bruce Lee mastered his art

"Bruce Lee is one of those few people about whom people want to know everything," says publisher Richard Grossinger.

"Bruce Lee is one of those few people about whom people want to know everything," says publisher Richard Grossinger.

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"Bruce Lee is one of those few people about whom people want to know everything," says publisher Richard Grossinger.

"Bruce Lee is one of those few people about whom people want to know everything," says publisher Richard Grossinger.

Oakland: Tale of The Dragon tells how Bruce Lee mastered his art

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The world knows the late Bruce Lee as the martial-arts movie superman with a body like a screaming whip who sent opponents twice his size reeling. But not even many fans know the inside story of how their hero got to be that good.

Now, two East Bay martial-arts professionals who watched Lee work when he was a young man are out with the first two installments in a projected five- volume history of a key phase in the apprenticeship of the future Little Dragon of Hollywood and Hong Kong movie fame.

In "The Dragon and the Tiger," Sid Campbell and Greglon Yimm Lee cover the 2 1/2 years when Bruce Lee spent time in Oakland at the home of an equally formidable but more traditional fighter twice his age -- James Yimm Lee, Greglon's late dad. He's the Tiger of the title.

Tempered by the older man and other fighting and bodybuilding mentors in the East Bay and San Francisco, the ferociously self-improving young Bruce Lee subjected himself to an all-or-nothing training regime in which he transformed everything from his finger muscles to his spiritual views. He was only in his early 20s when he melded martial arts, Taoist philosophy and bodybuilding into a synthesis that Greglon Lee compares to the basketball feats of Michael Jordan.

"He's more artist than he is martial," he said.

Bruce Lee, as the authors see it, was born in San Francisco, raised in Hong Kong and schooled in Seattle, but his persona was forged in Oakland.

"Everybody talks about Bruce, but they never talk about Oakland because nobody in Oakland spoke out," said Greglon Lee, who lives in Berkeley. "The story was never really told, and we felt Oakland should be proud of it."

The result of more than 20 years of planning and research, the book gathers the recollections of 50 to 60 friends and fellow fighters who knew him during the Oakland years of 1962-66 and his earlier high-school and college years in Seattle.

Greglon Lee lined up the sources, and Campbell worked out the form on butcher paper at his Oakland studio, determined to create an exhaustive historical work rather than another fan appreciation. Campbell knew that the 25 to 30 books that had been published on Bruce Lee didn't fully cover Lee's long apprenticeship and all those who contributed to its success. He wanted the record set straight.

The editors at North Atlantic Books/Frog Ltd., a small press in Berkeley specializing in books on the spiritual side of the martial arts, thought it was a good idea and agreed to publish a digest of Campbell's 1,800 pages of typescript in installments over several years.

Richard Grossinger, North Atlantic's co-publisher with his wife, Lindy Hough, said Lee ranks with Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali as a rare figure with transcendent charisma. "Bruce Lee is one of those few people about whom people want to know everything," he said.

The theme of the first two volumes is familiar: a young man fighting to survive in a world that holds him down. But what makes the narrative unusual is the intensity and totality of one man's campaign to gain control over himself and his environment.

Although Lee possibly pushed himself too far -- he died from a burst blood vessel in his brain in 1973 when he was just 33 -- he took the possibilities of self-transformation that captivated so many people in the 1960s and '70s to a level few knew was possible.

He was born Lee Jun Fan in San Francisco in 1940, the Year of the Dragon, while his Hong Kong parents were on tour as Chinese opera performers. The happenstance of his birthplace would change his life, enabling him to shake an uncertain future as a street tough in trouble with the law and migrate to America.

What comes through in the history's first volume is that Lee was an unusually gifted man. He could dance, write, draw, act and volley words with wit. He was physically and socially fearless, and his handwriting was perfect. More than most people -- Greglon Lee says Bruce Lee was as rare as one in a billion -- he had a lot he could build on.

He'd picked up a set of useful skills in adolescence, mastering cha-cha dancing and movie acting and, out of necessity, learning the wing chun gung fu (a.k.a. kung fu) system of self-defense from the legendary Yip Man.

But his transformation from the skinny kid with a pocket protector, high arches and bad eyesight to that of a master of the historical, spiritual and technical dimensions of kung fu didn't begin until he visited New York on another of his father's opera tours.

There, he met up with a master of another Chinese martial arts system, known as the Iron Palm or Poison Hand. The master showed his dubious pupil how to gather up the body's energies and release them explosively with pinpoint, close-in shots from a standing position.

Lee memorized the Iron Palm training routine, including the use of an herbal brew to toughen bone and sinew and customized weight work for the forearm and hand muscles using iron wrist rings and chunks of railroad track. He was on his way toward perfecting one of the weapons he'd use to amaze millions: the one-inch punch, a blow delivered from the chest, with the body's energy blasting bomblike from a quarter-inch area of one foreknuckle.

The next stage in Lee's development took place in Seattle, where his parents had sent him to live with a family that owned a restaurant. He worked as a busboy and felt so demeaned and racially stereotyped by the job that he'd often become rigid with rage. Co-workers feared he'd explode. "His trials and tribulations carried over into his sleep," the authors write "as he would toss and turn restlessly while he seemed to fight off unknown forces that were holding him back."

A promotion to waiter soothed Lee and freed up time to resume his martial- arts work. His renown soon spread at the high school he attended. After graduating, he set up shop as an instructor, teaching kung fu but also integrating styles he learned from older fighters.

The authors close the Seattle period with an anecdote about what happened to the karate fighter who taunted Lee as a showoff. Lee put off the challenge as long as he could, but the karateka wouldn't shut up. A match was called, and Lee with his uncanny speed checked the loudmouth's opening move before beating him unconscious in 11 seconds. He finished the job by angrily ordering the defeated fighter's buddy to mop up the blood. And with that, he walked off wordlessly.

Three years later, while he was a philosophy student in college and his reputation was spreading among fighters and bodybuilders in the Bay Area, he got a call from Jimmy Lee. Jimmy asked Bruce to come to Oakland to become his teacher. The young fighter accepted, seeing an opportunity to grow and to meet up again with friends and relatives in the Bay Area.

Bruce would become Jimmy's kung fu instructor, the only man who could beat him in a fight. He'd also soak up everything he could learn from the older man about the martial arts and about making it as an Asian man in America.

"Bruce was the sifu," Greglon Lee said. "My dad was helping him about life, which was just as important."

One of Jimmy's gifts to the obsessive Bruce was teaching him the value of slowing down. He showed the younger man how to articulate his thoughts in English, advice that would serve Bruce well in his later work as a teacher, writer and actor.

In an interview, Greglon Lee recounted a prophetic confession Bruce Lee once made to his dad: "The only problem I have -- I don't know when to turn it off."

Adopted into Jimmy's household on Monticello Avenue and embraced by older fighters who were awed by his skill, Bruce secured the foundation he needed to elaborate his precocious vision: kung fu as a way of life, as the expression in motion of the Taoist philosophy.

With Jimmy's help, he wrote a book, "Gung Fu: The Chinese Philosophical Art of Self-Defense." He opened a kung fu school and used as the instructional model a lengthy college essay he had written on Taoism. Believing that every student should master philosophy as well as the ability to move fluidly in every foreseeable fighting situation, he developed a synthesis he called jeet kune do -- literally, "the way of the intercepting fist."

Meanwhile, Bruce perfected his training regime, learned from Jimmy how to break a stack of bricks with the knife edge of his hand -- he flubbed painfully on the first try -- and studied under other older fighters for strategies on confronting opponents with fighting styles that were unfamiliar to him. He was determined to acquire the ability to best any contender, from kung fu artists to bulky American strongmen. The book explores his mental processes and training methods in detail.

The authors give special credit to several Bay Area martial artists who helped to make Bruce Lee what he would become, notably Wally Jay in Alameda, Al Novak and Allen Joe of Fremont, Ralph Castro in Daly City and George Lee in Richmond. The Little Dragon had different ideas about fighting than they did, but he modeled his professionalism on theirs.

In turn, they revered him as their sifu -- honored teacher.

"He kind of had a mission in him, a mission in life," Greglon Lee said. "It wasn't for ego, it wasn't for fame. It's just that he wanted to figure it out and know himself."